‘The Machine’ could mark a significant turning point for HPE or the ultimate in lost causes – and it could be argued the company has a bit of a track record there – viz its commitment to Intel’s Itanium processor. But the in-memory architecture does hold out the potential of being the next big step that IT takes.

And if HP’s developments in non-volatile memory devices prove to give the lead Chalmers feels sure they will, and they get licensed out in a timely fashion together with the licensing of a reference system architecture, there could soon be available a wide range of machines at price points that make fast, high-throughput systems the next obvious choice. The interest of the company in edge services also suggests the coming of distributed, virtualised, logical in-memory systems comprised of multiple edge devices and core systems ‘blocks’.

At Amazon Go, just swipe a code on your mobile phone on your way into the store to get started. Every item you remove from the shelf is automatically added to your virtual shopping cart. This requires some impressive technology, which Amazon teases in the video released today as a mix of "computer vision" along with "deep learning algorithms" and "sensor fusion much like you'd find in self-driving cars." The result is that once you've grabbed your groceries and put them into your bag, you simply walk out of the place—no lines, no cash registers, the bill goes straight to your Amazon account.

If you have heard of the Golden Triangle, it might be because of this: Mississippi State football. Around here, everybody loves the Bulldogs. And “bulldog” is an apt description of the man who runs economic development for the area: Joe Max Higgins. He considers job creation a full contact sport.

At 6.0 percent, unemployment is now just above the national average and a lot of people here credit Joe Max Higgins. He has attracted $6 billion of advanced industry including this mill run by Steel Dynamics. It’s one of the most hi-tech steel mills in the country. He got this helicopter factory up and running. Truck maker PACCAR used to build engines only in Europe. It opened its first U.S. plant in the Triangle.

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Our county has 95-gallon garbage bin with sensors which allow for easy verification if a street has not been serviced. They are emptied into garbage trucks equipped with McNeilus AutoReach robotic arms.

Amaury, the driver operates a Republic Services truck, and he visits our street twice a week. He operates the robotic arm from the cab of his truck. In a full day he can gather over 1,200 bins, twice as many as he previously did with a human partner. Amaury no longer needs the associate dangling at the back of the truck doing a dangerous and stinky job. The contribution of the robotic arm: half the human resources, twice the production, and a much less tiring job.

The Volvo Group is planning to take such garbage collection into narrower streets and to places where the weather is not as pleasant as in my Florida county. Its Robot-based Autonomous Refuse (ROAR) project entails much more than a truck with a robotic arm. A robot carried at the back of the truck will zip around the streets and bring the garbage bins to the truck. A drone launched from the truck’s roof will scan the area and guide the robot to the bins.

The garbage bin itself is evolving and will further change the collection of garbage. BigBelly makes solar powered trash compactors, which can hold eight times more garbage than a standard bin. Volume sensors trigger the compacting mechanism and the bin communicates with a cloud-based management system which coordinates collections.

The book, conceived of and published by Apple, is a glossy $300 (that’s for the plus size; it’s $200 for a smaller version) tribute to the last 20 years of the company’s industrial design legacy, and to its progenitor, Steve Jobs. Photographer Andrew Zuckerman shot the 450 pages of products in Apple’s signature stark style—white background, high saturation—even turning the messy act of prototyping into minimalist glamour shots.

Viconic Sporting developed an underlayer for synthetic turf systems that will make fields safer for those who play on them. Viconic’s technology is widely used for impact management in the automotive and sporting industries and in the U.S. Military. Viconic will further explore the relationship between optimized head impact protection and the frequency of lower limb injuries in an effort to provide the synthetic turf industry a tool to specify systems that maximize player safety and minimize safety costs.

Sales of objects like vinyl records, paper notebooks and even board games have consistently grown over the past decade, as has their cultural relevance. Meanwhile, big brands in e-commerce, including Warby Parker and Amazon, are rushing to open the very brick-and-mortar stores they promised to supplant.

What’s driving this switch? Many assume it’s nostalgia, led by the wistful romance of aging Luddites. But in fact, many of analog’s newest fans are millennials drawn to its raw utility—the designer who uses a Moleskine notebook, for example, to sketch out a website’s early look.

Aerospace giant Boeing (BA), the country's largest exporter, started delivering 787 Dreamliners from its new plant in South Carolina in 2012. Both that factory and the company's plants in Washington state are running at record production. Boeing delivered 768 airliners in 2015, up 163% in 10 years. Archrival Airbus delivered its first U.S.-assembled airliner from its new Alabama factory in April, and Brazilian plane maker Embraer (ERJ) recently moved assembly of its smallest private jets to Florida.

U.S. auto production and employment has also been growing steadily since bottoming out in 2009 with the bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler.The industry is operating within 7% of record levels, making 12 million cars and trucks a year. Not only have GM (GM), Ford (F) and Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) all been hiring and investing in U.S. plants, but foreign automakers are expanding operations here as well. The largest BMW plant in the world is now in South Carolina, and the plant exports most of the cars it builds there (see video below)

And the boom isn't just about big-ticket items. Chemical production hit a record $797 billion last year, up 30% in the last 10 years. The chemical boom has been fueled by the record U.S. energy boom, which has made oil and natural gas particularly cheap. Petroleum is a key raw material for many chemicals, most of which are produced using energy from natural gas.

Salesforce enlisted the creative studio Obscura Digital to craft a stunning LED video wall for the lobby of their flagship office. Stretching 108 feet long and containing over 7 million pixels, the video wall features incredibly sharp, HD video content that transforms the space. It’s the longest continuous 4mm LED screen in the United States.

“From capturing California’s Redwood National Forest in stunning 12K resolution, to a designing a convincing CG waterwall and more – we held nothing back in striving to impart a sense of wonder to everyone that enters the building,"

Stahl’s report tells the story of how a young doctor and nurse in Colombia unraveled the mystery of a rash of patients who were coming down with Alzheimer’s disease in their mid-40s -- figuring out that they were part of one large, extended family, connected generations back. All of them lived in Antioquia, a Colombian region whose capital is Medellin. The doctor reached out to Dr. Ken Kosik, then a Harvard professor lecturing in Bogota, who realized the significance of the discovery. “When we looked at the family trees, about 50 percent of the offspring were getting the disease. That’s a clear signature of a gene,” says Kosik.

A simple genetic test could reveal which members of the family had the gene mutation that would guarantee they would get early-onset Alzheimer’s. This gave researchers a unique opportunity to test therapies on persons who were certain to develop the disease, years before they showed any symptoms -- a rare window to see whether a treatment might be able to prevent Alzheimer’s. The nonprofit Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix teamed up with the National Institutes of Health, philanthropists, and the drug company Genentech to start a multimillion dollar clinical trial to test an immunotherapy drug to remove amyloid plaque, a substance that builds up in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients years before they start getting sick.

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

“It started with a truck equipped with a conveyor belt which rapidly moved shingles and other materials to the top of the roof. A crew stripped off the old roof and tossed the materials into another truck, which took the stuff to be recycled.

The modern roofer works with a Stanley staple gun, wears Cougar Paw shoes which help keep him from sliding on debris on sloping roofs, and uses Husky magnetic sweepers to keep the work site tidy. Our contractor, Magyar Roofing, diligently documented every step of the way with over 90 images on digital camera.

The humble shingle is designed these days for aesthetics, energy efficiency, and algae resistance. Also, and importantly for us in Florida, they are meant to handle winds up to 130 mph that accompany some hurricanes. It's not just the shingles -there are layers of moisture barrier, under-eave ventilation, and insulation that supplement the shingle protection.

As I said, I was impressed. The Magyar crew did the work over two days, and could have squeezed the job into one day if we did not have a two-tiered roof. A couple of decades ago, that work took much longer, was much less safe, and was not nearly as well documented.

The digital documentation that the contractor provided us and the inspection they arranged also helped us get a significant discount on our home insurance. Pixie dust, indeed.”

GE provides an annual update at their Minds+Machine event about the Industrial Internet with cameos from BP, Schindler, Intel, Exelon and impact on oil and gas and other industrials, healthcare and utilities. 2 hours on digital transformation of complex industries.

Blue Apron, which is based in New York City and sends weekly recipes and ingredients for people to cook at home, has benefited from a trifecta of marketplace trends: People are increasingly interested in eating “clean,” in more sophisticated home cooking techniques, and in on-demand everything. Blue Apronmeals range from the exotic—za’atar-spiced steaks with rutabaga-barberry tabbouleh andlabneh cheese—to the basic—BBQ sloppy joes with green bean and tomato salad.

“This is Magi, a system that captures images in 3-D and “4K” ultrahigh resolution and displays the resulting frames at five times the usual rate. Trumbull developed the technology as a way to create movie experiences more immersive than regular 3-D or giant-screen IMAX—and restore the joy of going out to the movies.

Trumbull inside a green-screen studio he is building on his Berkshires property.

Trumbull, 74, has spent his entire life thinking about how people experience the illusions of cinema. He grew up in Los Angeles fascinated by the Cinerama widescreen movie format; got his first Hollywood job, doing visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, in his 20s; and went on to direct two cult-classic films (Brainstorm and Silent Running) and design visual effects for Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Now, in an age when the movie theater is losing its allure, he’s hoping to wow people yet again—this time using Magi’s “hyper-­reality,” which enables audiences to connect intensely with stories and vividly experience a character’s perspective.”

The special issue of Wallpaper, over 500 pages long, and has a poster insert (220,000 copies each customized – see video below) with 6 standout products, people and places for each of the last 20 years which have exemplified what the design revolution

“The world of objects has also shifted on its axis. And in more and more areas, design – beautiful, functional design – has shifted from last-minute bolt-on, a perfunctory styling job, to first principle. We now begin with design and the world is a better-designed place.

The next two decades will see a new revolution as technology emerges from behind the screen and almost everything becomes smarter.”

Happy Thanksgiving! As you enjoy turkey think of another growing form of protein.

The world’s largest open ocean farm in Panama started in 2007. The goal is to raise cobia in a stress free, low density and high-oxygen environment. The company says it “results in healthier fish that is naturally high in protein and very rich in Omega 3 (DHA & EPA), with levels almost 2X as high as farmed Atlantic salmon.”

The video below was from 2014

Today, you can download their virtual reality app and see the rapid progress they have made since

“Humans are willful creatures. No other species on the planet has gained so much mastery over its own fate. We have neutralized countless threats that once killed us in the millions: we have learned to protect ourselves from the elements and predators in the wild; we have developed cures and treatments for many deadly diseases; we have transformed the small gardens of our agrarian ancestors into the vast fields of industrial agriculture; and we have dramatically increased our chances of bearing healthy children despite all the usual difficulties.”

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

The supply chains for Tropicana (owned by Pepsi-Cola in nearby Bradenton) and Simply (owned by Coca-Cola in Auburndale) orange juice provide a glimpse of the automation needed to produce juice and illustrate how jobs in the industry have evolved.

Larger orange groves utilize robotic harvesters. The Oxbo tree shakers and pickup equipment can work day and night and collect up to a million pounds of fruit a day. Frost, which can be deadly to the crop, is easier to monitor with today's sensors. Satellite imagery is used these days to optimize picking times.

Then you get into the processing, and the steps there would humble most brewmasters—getting the aroma, color, and taste just right; the flash pasteurization; and the handling of all the by-products (including using the peel to create a form of ethanol). Next is the state-of-the-art packaging, and finally shipping, via pipeline, refrigerated rail cars, and shipping containers.

I profiled Facebook’s Open Compute initiative as it launched its Prineville data center in the New Technology Elite. Now it is tackling the telecom infrastructure side

“To that end, we recently started working with a few partners on Open Packet DWDM — a packet transponder and open line transport system with open optical specifications that enable any interested party to contribute systems, components, or software. Today we’re excited to announce Voyager, a networking solution for Open Packet DWDM networks — and what we believe is the industry’s first “white box” transponder and routing solution. Our partners have helped us successfully test Voyager and begin to build an ecosystem around it. We plan to contribute the design to TIP via the Backhaul: Open Optical Packet Transport (OOPT) project group, with the aim of encouraging more open and programmable network architectures.”

“I couldn’t tell if the actual movie would be mostly science fiction or mostly a love story.” says Stephen Wolfram (the creator of Mathematica) who along with his son has a consulting role in the movie.

I have seen the movie twice and cannot make up my mind either or indeed if it is more about a third topic - about communication between humans and with aliens.

The lead character played by Amy Adams is a linguist. We learn early on she is familiar with Portuguese, Farsi, Sanskrit and the movie weaves in trivia like Urdu is written from right to left.

So, what does that have to do with STEM?

To start with the movie is adapted from Story of Your Life, a short story by Ted Chiang. In linguistics, it's known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, “or as Chiang puts it in the film's production notes "the idea that the language you speak determines how you perceive the world and even what kinds of thoughts you can have." It may even determine how your brain is wired. (As an aside, it is incredible that a short story has been adapted into such a visually dense movie, and with other references to Fermat’s Principle of Least Time and Bayes’ Theorem excised so the movie did not confuse the audience even more.)

And then there is the logogram language of the aliens. As Wired reports “The aliens regard time as non-linear, and the language needed to reflect that. But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. “I said, ‘eureka.'””

Finally, here is repeated use of 12 – the symbol of cosmic order, as in 12 signs of the Zodiac, 12 year cycle in Asia. 12 spaceships show up in the movie, and there is science which tries to decode their landing sites. Jeremy Renner who plays a theoretical physicist uses gobs of computing power to analyze the alien logos into 12 sectors.

The non-linear time dimension in the movie is tough to get your head around. Very few of the alien logograms are actually translated into English sub-titles in the movie. Finally, bringing out the human elements which actually dominate the movie, pose an interesting challenge. As Jeremy Renner explains

“How I deal with, like, zeroes and ones, and [makes a sound like a chattering computer, or maybe an old dot matrix printer] and all these really unemotional, scientific things? How do we make this guy a human?”

It is a fascinating movie. Go see it – maybe 2-3 times to finally get your head and heart around all the nuances.

Jamboard works like a digital whiteboard, letting users sketch out ideas, attach digital sticky notes, plus bring in content from the web into a single, constantly updating workspace. People can use Jamboard to collaborate both on the 55-inch mega-display of the same name, or using accompanying tablet and smartphone apps for iOS and Android.

The current versions of the tiles actually have a two percent loss on efficiency, so 98 percent of what you’d normally get from a traditional solar panel, according to Elon Musk. But the company is working with 3M on improved coatings that have the potential to possibly go above normal efficiency, since it could trap the light within, leading to it bouncing around and resulting in less energy loss overall before it’s fully diffused.

Of course, there’s the matter of price: Tesla’s roof cost less than the full cost of a roof and electricity will be competitive or better than the cost of a traditional roof combined with the cost of electricity from the grid, Musk said. Tesla declined to provide specific pricing at the moment, since it will depend on a number of factor including installation specifics on a per home basis.

Excellent article in MIT Technology Review about advanced manufacturing in Greenville, and how the workforce has to keep evolving

“It’s not just that people need certain technical skills to work in these new factories. They must also have softer skills, like the ability to solve problems and work in teams. Three years ago Solvay, a Belgian chemicals and materials manufacturer, decided to hire 100 new people for its plant in Greenville, which made carbon fibers in growing demand from customers in the aerospace industry. It made the ability to work collaboratively a key focus of the interviewing process. “We are looking for not just mechanical and industrial skills but also the ability to look beyond what’s right in front of you,” says Kelly Kosek, the human resources manager at Solvay. “You don’t just punch a clock on your job and check out.”

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Till her untimely passing in March 2016, Hadid was the lead partner of her London firm that has architected dazzling structures around the world. Her senior partner, Patrik Schumacher, has called their work “parametricism,” which he views as “a successor to postmodernism: shaping architecture with algorithms, computer design and new materials.”

Hadid's first major commission was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, distinctive with its hard concrete structural bends. Her toughest assignment, she had said, was the MAXXI Italian National Museum of the 21st Century Arts in Rome, which took a decade to construct and has been hailed as a masterpiece by critics. More successes followed, including the Aquatics Center for the 2012 London Olympics and the Guangzhou Opera House.

To promote its upcoming new miniseries Mars (starts this evening), the National Geographic Channel convinced its associated magazine to print a Mars-focused issue, and it set up a VR-Mars outpost in the middle of New York City. For the channel, the miniseries is more than just a new show; it's part of an effort to rebrand itself as a source of serious, premium, science-focused content.

So, while the series' focus is a fictional drama about the Earth's first attempt at colonizing Mars, a strong effort has been made to be as accurate and realistic as possible. Fictional segments are mixed in with documentary footage from the present day, with experts talking about what it would take to get people to the red planet.

Time (sub required) has ideas from around the world we should consider as people fret about the electoral college and other idiosyncrasies of the US system

SHORTER CAMPAIGN SEASONS

Little wonder many Americans are sick of the candidates–this election will have lasted nearly 600 days by the time polls close on Nov. 8. By comparison, Canada’s longest campaign season in recent history lasted 11 weeks. In Japan, campaigns last just 12 days.

NONE OF THE ABOVE

India and Greece, among other nations, have a “none of the above” option on ballots, allowing voters to indicate disapproval without sitting out the election. In the U.S., only the state of Nevada has this option.

RANKED VOTING

Australia and Ireland let voters rank their choices. This would allow Americans to vote for a third-party candidate, knowing their second choice might get the vote in later counts.

I know you are sick of these elections and do not want to hear about the 2020 ones for a couple of years, but Peter Diamandis is looking ahead and projects scenarios like

“ Imagine I'm walking down the street to my local coffee shop, and a photorealistic avatar of the presidential candidate on the bus stop advertisement I pass turns to me and says:

"Hi Peter, I'm running for president. I know you have two 5-year old boys going to kindergarten at XYZ School. Do you know that my policy means that we'll be cutting tuition in half for you? That means you'll immediately save $10,000 if you vote for me…"

If you pause and listen, the candidate's avatar may continue: "I also noticed that you care a lot about science, technology, and space exploration – I do too, and I'm planning on increasing NASA's budget by 20% next year. Let's go to Mars!"

"I'd really appreciate your vote. Every vote and every dollar counts. Do you mind flicking me a $1 sticker to show your support?"”

“although most workers I encountered expressed positive sentiments about the new technologies, many prominent academics, analysts, and economists are worried sick about the new machine age.

“But there’s a case to be made that these fears are misplaced. A look back at how disruptive technologies have made their way into common use suggests that automation can take its own sweet time in displacing human labor. Research on the history of UPC codes and scanners since 1948; the ways in which cars have gradually been taking over control of driving from humans since cruise control was first introduced by Chrysler in 1958; and more recent case studies on artificial intelligence, robotics, self-service, and many other technologies and their related impact on jobs have led to what may seem to be a counterintuitive conclusion. Automation does affect many “3D tasks” — dull, dirty, and dangerous work that most humans are ultimately glad to give up. But societies absorb automation at a pace that’s much slower than technology’s evolution. And five powerful “circuit breakers” help delay and influence the trajectory of automation in surprising ways.”

On Twitter, for example, the handle @POTUS will be made available to the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017. The account will retain its more than 11 million followers, but start with no tweets on the timeline. @POTUS44, a newly created handle maintained by NARA, will contain all of President Obama’s tweets and will be accessible to the public on Twitter as an archive of President Obama’s use of the account.

On Instagram and Facebook, the incoming White House will gain access to the White House username, URL, and retain the followers, but will start with no content on the timeline. An archive of White House content that was posted to the Obama White House Instagram and Facebook will continue to be accessible to the public at Instagram.com/ObamaWhiteHouse and Facebook.com/ObamaWhiteHouse. Facebook accounts for President Obama and the Vice President and the Instagram accounts belonging to the First Lady and Vice President will be moved to new “44” usernames and preserved by NARA.

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Tony DiBenedetto lives a few miles from us, but the experiment he describes could easily have been done from our street or a growing number of streets around the world. DiBenedetto, CEO of Tribridge, an IT systems integrator, realized he was using his Chevy Volt less than 5% of the time.

"I started taking Uber, and I start journaling about every single trip. I did it for about 30 days, and I drew a number of conclusions that led me to sell my car.”

Next, he looked for opportunities across his company:

“I took a look at our company's T&E and our people are renting a ton of cars. So I got my whole exec team to stop renting cars, then I rolled Uber out to the whole company, and we've documented the savings. We're saving 35% on T&E because we're not using rental cars and taxis."

After the hundreds of Uber rides he has taken, I asked him if he had drawn a demographic profile of the drivers:

"Most of them were not ex-taxi drivers. I would say 50% of the people who drove me in that first month had a second job. It was everything from young kids just trying to make it, to retired people, or people who were bored. One of my drivers was a helicopter pilot who for two weeks a month worked for the big oil companies in New Orleans. The other two weeks he just didn't see himself doing nothing. He's ex-military, and so he picked up the Uber thing to basically not be bored. I thought that was interesting. The retired people were all pretty similar: They wanted to get out of the house or make a little extra cash. I'd say 5% to 10% were in between jobs. There's no question that it fills a gap in employment. It allows for people to run their little businesses, and still do Uber as a supplement. All the drivers love the flexibility."

Home technology is always moving, always improving, always promising to provide ease and convenience to our lives. So what sort of innovations stand to make a big impact? We caught a glimpse of the very near future at the CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) Expo held recently in Dallas.

Shyp, the San Francisco startup that aims to make shipping easy, will let you use your smartphone to summon a courier to your door. If you want, it will even pack your stuff for you. But the company, which launched in 2013, has been in no hurry to expand. It still only has couriers and warehouses in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

But as of today, there is an aspect of its service that's now available throughout the U.S. You have to pack your items and take them to Fedex, UPS, or the post office, which at first blush might sound like you're doing all the work that would otherwise be done by Shyp. But before you do, you can see all the service offerings from Fedex, UPS, and the USPS and choose the cheapest one that will deliver your package on time. You then pay for shipping and print a label using Shyp's mobile app or web interface.

SolarReserve’s Sandstone project would include up to 10 concentrated solar arrays, each equipped with a molten salt system capable of storing the sun’s energy to generate power after dark, CEO Kevin Smith said.

The company already has built one such array, the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, on 1,600 acres of federal land outside of Tonopah, 225 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The $1 billion array began delivering power to NV Energy late last year.

Smith said project Sandstone would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts, enough to supply about a million homes. That’s on par with a nuclear power plant or the Hoover Dam and far bigger than any of the world’s existing solar facilities.

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Amazon's recently opened fulfillment centers in Ruskin and Lakeland are each twice as large as the Valpak center. They are designed for speed, driven by the move to same day and Sunday delivery in the grocery/retail business. Within minutes of orders being clicked by customers, Kiva robots start picking the items and bringing them to humans to inspect and pack. The short (a little over a foot), square, yellow robots whiz around and carry pods (tall racks) with items weighing up to 700 pounds. Instead of humans walking around those giant facilities, the items are brought to them, shaving time on each package. The Lakeland facility, which ships larger items than the Ruskin center, also boasts the Robo-Stow, which stacks pallets of merchandise. It's huge—as big as an adult African elephant.

Meanwhile, at Amazon’s Davenport distribution center, the whizbang is found in the sorting technology with its miles of conveyor belts. This center receives packages from other locations, sorts them by zip code and stacks them six feet high on pallets before trucking them to nearby post offices. It allows Amazon to control each package much longer and further down the delivery "last mile," which helps it to further optimize the shipping process.

Conversation AI represents just one of Jigsaw’s wildly ambitious projects. The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google’s massive infra­structure and engineer­ing muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship. The group sees its work, in part, as taking on the most intract­able jobs in Google’s larger mission to make the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”

The Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept does away with a traditional mechanical frame, replacing it with a flexible material that bends when the driver turns. It adjusts sensitivity based on speed; the effort required to turn increases as the bike goes faster, improving stability and safety at high speeds while adding an unprecedented sense of connection to the riding experience. The focus on connection, however, doesn’t stop there. An integrated “Digital Companion” suggests adjustments to improve performance, an augmented-reality visor tracks eye movement to provide constant real-time feedback, and self-balancing technology allows riders to remain in riding position, even at a complete stop.

A Volvo executive gave me a quick tour of his hometown, Gothenburg from a 29th floor restaurant. He pointed to the area where ship builders dominated. It is mostly software and digital businesses today. A boat tour of the harbor showed the changing fortunes of the largest port in the Baltics – plenty of Norwegian oil and Volvo cars flow today. A taxi driver told me the success of the XC90 SUV is keeping the local Volvo plant extremely busy. The ownership today is Chinese and another Swede told me of Ericsson’s challenges over the last few decades. The well preserved section of Gamla stan, medieval Stockholm is in sharp contrast to the “train of the future” I had taken to it from the airport.

The economy keeps evolving, and Swedes continue to be rated as some of the happiest people on earth. That’s saying something given the harsh weather they endure most of the year and even with having to pay some of the highest taxes in the world.

It showed in small and large innovations I noticed throughout my trip to Sweden this week. The Arlanda airport express train is ergonomic, has cotton filled seating, soft LED lighting, glass luggage racks, biodegradable paper in restrooms - all make you wish it took longer than 20 minutes (in contrast a bus ride I took on way back took 45 minutes). The trains run on 100% green electricity from renewable sources, such as hydropower, wind power or biofuels. Only biking would emit less CO2 on the 25 mile stretch. BTW, only one per cent of solid waste goes to landfill in Sweden – with the rest recycled or used to produce heat, electricity or vehicle fuel in the form of biogas.

The SJ train from Stockholm to Gothenburg was a model of efficiency and friendliness with free wifi even at speeds of 125 mph. The attendant scanned my paper ticket with her mobile phone. My fellow passengers were pleasant and welcoming.

The airports have self-service kiosks to generate baggage tags and you scan them on your own onto conveyor belts which confirm your flight number on their displays and send the bags on their merry ways. The security lines have automated trays.

Sweden is sparsely populated – still recovering from the mass emigration in the late 1800s when a quarter of the population left for the US. So such automation is commonplace.

And yet the intellectual and design capital is first rate. ABBA, Steig Larsson and IKEA designers are just a few of such examples. This blog has cataloged Swedish leadership with cashless payments, telematics, voice over IP, next-gen bike helmets and countless other innovations.

Tarnopolsky now thinks he knows why. In studies where blood is drawn immediately after people exercised, researchers have found that many positive changes occur throughout the body during and right after a workout. “Going for a run is going to improve your skin health, your eye health, your gonadal health,” he says. “It’s unbelievable.” If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed.

James Hoevelmann of Sullivan, Missouri, used to work in hospital construction. But these days, even though he suffers from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the retired carpenter, 74, doesn’t want to go anywhere near a medical facility. And he doesn’t need to, even though his COPD has been bad enough in the past to regularly land him in the emergency room and the intensive care unit. The reason: Hoevelmann now gets his care from Mercy Virtual Care Center some 50 miles away in Chesterfield.

Equipped with an iPad and devices such as a blood pressure monitor and scale that stream his vital signs and other data from his home to the Mercy Virtual “command center,” he and his providers have been able to detect subtle health shifts in time to avert the cascade of deterioration that put him in the ICU. “We can trend the data on a daily basis and intervene in many cases even before patients experience symptoms,” says Gavin Helton, Mercy’s medical director. Says Hoevelmann: “I feel safer knowing I have those people behind me.”

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Tony Prophet, Corporate Vice President of Education Marketing at Microsoft (he has since moved to Salesforce) is tasked with bringing new digital education experiences to the 1.5 billion teachers and students in primary and secondary education around the world.

The goal is to evolve beyond the three "R"s of traditional school education—reading, writing and ‘rithmetic—to the modern five "C"s. The National Education Association has identified the first four Cs as part of its framework for 21st century learning: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. With Microsoft, they are also helping emphasize a 5th C, which represents computational thinking.

The Torkinmäki School in Finland uses OneNote Class Notebook as a central collaboration space, a content library to store class materials (handwriting, text, web content, even audio and video) and an individual notebook for every student in the class that teachers can see in real time to provide feedback. Skype in the Classroom is allowing classrooms in California to connect with schools in New Zealand and elsewhere, and take students on virtual field trips. Sway is a storytelling app that makes it quick and easy to create polished, interactive lessons, assignments, reports, newsletters, and more—from any device.​​​

The BBC micro:bit, supported by Microsoft, is aimed at virtually every Year 7 student (ages 11-12) in the UK. It is a wearable computing device, smaller than a credit card, that students can use to explore the possibilities of computing.

The iPhone is the Default Phone, the one you buy when you want a phone, not a project.

The Google Pixel changes that. It offers the look and competence of an iPhone, with a truly great camera and loads of innovative software and services. It changes my answer to the question I hear most often: What phone should you get?

“Travelmate is the first smart autonomous suitcase. It can move autonomously in both vertical and horizontal modes. Travelmate is smart enough to adjust to the speed that you’re going at and it can easily maneuver through obstacles like crowds and uneven terrain. It also has an inaudible engine that is nonetheless powerful enough to carry or nudge along an extra suitcase for you. And if you’re in a hurry, Travelmate can go up to 6.75 mph or 10.86 km/h.”

Ever since the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program opened in 2003, people have been intrigued by the field of antennas off mile 11.3 of the Tok Cutoff Road.

The field of radio transmitters designed to heat portions of space has not operated since 2014. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute took it over from the U.S. Air Force in 2015. Despite that inactivity, 350 people were curious enough to travel to Gakona on Aug. 27 and explore the HAARP ­­facility during an open house held by faculty and staff members of the Geophysical Institute.

Long a conversation piece for people who questioned what Department of Defense scientists were doing in the Copper River Valley far from any town, HAARP will soon host its first campaigns under university ownership.

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Dr. Russell Fricano teaches urban planning at Minnesota State University (Mankato). Before his teaching career, he had spent two decades as a regional planner in car-dependent Los Angeles County, and has a good perspective on how technology has changed the planner's job:

"When I began my planning career and we analyzed a site, we used Mylar sheets that had different layers of information. Some sheets showed topography, others displayed environmental areas, roads, and infrastructure. You put them all together on a light table, and you tried to figure out the various attributes of the property as a composite. Doing so would give you major headaches. Today, we have Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a way of compiling in a digital format various features that you can map. It basically organizes a collection of digitized map-related information and it's capable of holding and using data describing places on the Earth's surface.”

“Technology is an integral part of the planning job today. If you take the certification exam of the American Planning Association, you are expected to be familiar with the latest technology.

And planning has gone global. You see digital smart signs on highways with accident and other traffic information. That was something we borrowed from Europe, but it's now very much part of our everyday life. It assists you when you drive, and smoothes out the traffic flow.”

As if all that change was not dramatic enough, urban planners increasingly have to keep up with citizens who use real-time traffic pattern information from navigation apps like Waze.

The credit card, dubbed Motion Code, contains a small display in the reverse of the card across the signature strip which randomly generates the card's new security code -- the card verification value (CVV) -- every hour, according to The Memo, which spoke to the company, Oberthur Technologies. This makes the card useless for any thief who has the card's number without the new CVV.

More than 100 years ago, the barn that now occupies a pristine piece of property in the Catskill Mountains functioned as all barns do, by housing livestock, feed, and farm implements.

But that was then, and this is now, and based on the level of technology recently incorporated into the relocated and refurbished building, you’d never guess that its roots date back to before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.

In the recycling industry, waste materials are typically crushed and torn into tiny pieces to make them easier to sort. The mixture is then dumped into a pool where wood and plastic float, and metal and rock sink.

Salvage robots like those made by Zen Robotics in Helsinki, Finland, are making this process obsolete. The robots can spot items of value – like pieces of hardwood or copper – and pick them out as they pass by. This is quicker and larger items may be worth more whole than in pieces.

In the last two years, Zen Robotics has installed its robots at 14 sites around the world. So far, they have collected 4200 tonnes of valuable material.

But the company wants its robots to do more. Giving them more dexterous hands and arms would let them dismantle items to get at parts inside them, for example. Apple has developed a phone recycling robot called Liam, which can pull apart a discarded phone in seconds, preparing the device for recycling. Zen Robotics wants a Liam for all kinds of waste.